One wanted to play when pushing 60, but it was only a friendly – against Barcelona. Another thought his club was a BBQ restaurant. Another had never seen a match. There are messiahs and men on the run, philanthropists and fraudsters, a gun-runner, fake sheikhs and others who don’t exist; grenade-tossers and just tossers. Some even like football.

The world’s oldest league club was the subject of a trillion dollar con – and nearly folded because a train didn’t arrive in North Korea. Two others were respectively rescued from the abyss by an oligarch and a sheikh - and turned into eternally grateful mega clubs. The adventures of British football’s foreign legion of owners are as diverse as their backgrounds.

In these fascinating tales, sportswriter Bob Holmes takes us to oblivion and back amid nuclear submarines, unpaid milk bills, the axis of evil, Angolan diamonds and deliberately crashed F1 cars.